- Difficulty acquiring and using oral and written language
- Difficulty in phonological awareness, including segmenting, blending and manipulating sounds in words
- Difficulty mastering the alphabetical principle and basic decoding skills (sounds to letters)
- Slow, inaccurate laboured reading (lacking fluency)
- Difficulty acquiring age appropriate sight words recognition skills (visual coding)
- Difficulty learning to spell accurately
- Difficulty learning and retaining multi-syllabic vocabulary
- Limited reading comprehension due to weak decoding and/or word recognition and fluency skills
- Oral language skills are often stronger than written language skills
